17 Spring Trail-Running Shoes

Need help finding a new favorite pair of trail kicks?

Check out our reviews of 17 new trail-running shoes for spring 2014.

And, to be entered to win a pair of Topo Mountain Trainers, just leave a comment on this page telling us what you're training for this year! Please note: This contest has already passed. Congrats to reader Michael Eblin for being randomly selected from those who commented to win a pair of Topos.

Twice a year, our gear closet here at the Trail Runner office in Carbondale, Colorado, fills to the brim with a cornucopia of new trail-running shoes.

Meanwhile, all over North America, boxes of shoes show up on roughly 70 doorsteps of our freelance wear testers. This team is made up of everyday trail runners just like you—readers of our magazine, moms, dads, race directors, adventurers, speed demons, back-of-the-packers, seasoned ultrarunners, newbies, gearheads and more.

Their task—and ours—is to take these shoes for a test drive on every kind of trail imaginable. After several months, the shoes have seen everything from the rocky ridges of the Appalachians to the sandy plains of the Southwest. They’ve splashed through puddles and snowdrifts, run up and down mountains, across deserts and through creeks.

We comb through hundreds of pages of feedback from our testers, seek out common threads and boil it all down into the succinct reviews you find here. It is our hope that these reviews can point you toward your new favorite trail shoe.